I spent Christmas in Meridian, Mississippi, which is a city of 40,000 people surrounded by countryside for 60 miles in every direction. My brother and I talked a bit about how rural Mississippi is, which made me wonder whether it was the most rural state.
So I pulled out my 2004 World Almanac when I got home, and looked up the largest city in each American state. Here are the states with the smallest largest cities:
1. Vermont (Burlington; 39,466) 2. West Virginia (Charleston; 51,702) 3. Wyoming (Cheyenne; 53,658) 4. Maine (Portland; 63,882) 5. Delaware (Wilmington; 72,503) 6. North Dakota (Fargo; 91,204) 7. Montana (Billings; 92,008) 8. New Hampshire (Manchester; 108,398) 9. South Carolina (Columbia; 117,394) 10. South Dakota (Sioux Falls; 130,491) 13. Mississippi (Jackson; 180,881)
Admittedly, there are better ways to judge how rural a state is, but the size of a state's largest city can indicate whether the state has any urbanity at all. In the cases of the first seven or so states on the list, the answer seems to be "no".
North Dakota and Montana appear to be the most urban-deprived states in the Union. Vermont and Maine have Boston and Montreal nearby; West Virginia has Pittsburgh and D.C.; Wyoming has Denver; Delaware has Baltimore and Philadelphia. For people in North Dakota and Montana, though, it's a long drive to Denver, Seattle, and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
(The below was written in 1972, 12 years before the Bhopal disaster that it unintentionally and eerily prefigures.)
When ecology first crept into the scene, industry seized it as an advertising opportunity; not a filter was bought that the buyer didn't take an ad about cleaning up the rivers and waters. In fact, at one point someone figured out that more was spent drumbeating about cleanup than on the equipment. Industry began to sense that the public belief that more was better was beginning to fall away. Union Carbide dropped its slogan, There's a Little Bit of Union Carbide in Everybody's Home. They wanted you to think of the plastics and the sandwich bags, and instead a Little Bit of Union Carbide meant: the wind's shifted, here it comes again, shut the doors, close the windows, you know what it cost to have the curtains cleaned last time.
-- "Adam Smith" [George J. W. Goodman], Supermoney, pg. 258
One test of a friendship or a love affair: All other things being equal, are you happier because you know and see the person? More importantly, is he or she happier for knowing and seeing you?
The difference between infatuation and love: If you're infatuated, you're thinking about yourself; if you're in love, you're thinking about her.
According to one of my library school professors, doctoral candidates could make money back in the day by writing article abstracts for the article-abstract databases that libraries subscribe to. She told us that students would often write these abstracts while hung over on a Saturday or Sunday morning.
I think I've found an example of one of these.
The example is an abstract for a 1984 article titled "The Future of Yalta", written by Zbigniew Brzezinski.
In the article, Brzezinski discussed the geopolitical background of the 1945 Yalta Conference between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt; its long-term significance; and what future changes we might see in how NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations live with its consequences.
In the abstract of the article, on the other hand, the abstracter seems to be convinced that Brzezinski wrote about a country named Yalta. Highlights:
Subject: YALTA (Ukraine) -- Politics & government
Abstract: Focuses on the foreign relations of Yalta in Ukraine with other European countries and the U.S. Concept of politics in Yalta; Dominance of Soviet Union diplomacy in the Eurasian land mass; Alliance of Yalta with Germany and Russia.
It's not quite funny enough to be a deliberate joke, which leaves me with two theories about the reviewer: (1) hung over; or, (2) in too much of a hurry to actually read the article.
You make the call.
The signal-to-noise ratio of political blogs and Usenet political newsgroups would soar if their participants would remember this simple point:
The world is full to the gills with stupid people who say awful things on the Internet. Pointing this out doesn’t constitute a political argument.
One of the downsides of the multitude of social cliques that David Brooks enthuses about is that (as Brooks himself notes) we need know nothing about the people in the cliques we don't belong to.
We make this problem even worse if, when we do choose to engage the people and ideas of another clique, we engage the worst people and the nonsensical arguments of that clique rather than its best people and its compelling arguments.
I speak from sad experience when I say: Self-respect gained so cheaply is worth little.